


Long John Silver's

by jerseydevious



Category: Batman (Comics)
Genre: Bad Parent Arthur Brown, Gen, Hurt Stephanie Brown, Worried Parent Bruce Wayne, possibly part of a series, steph has emotions on bruce accidentally
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-03
Updated: 2019-04-03
Packaged: 2020-01-04 11:29:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18342776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jerseydevious/pseuds/jerseydevious
Summary: Arthur Brown dies, and Steph doesn't know what the hell she feels about it.





	Long John Silver's

**Author's Note:**

> This may or may not become a series, so be warned, lmao.

When Steph was young, really young, her mother camped out with her on the living room floor when they bought fish and chips from Long John Silver’s. Back then, eating in the living room had been a novel thing; it was firmly established that Steph would eat at the table, because at six, she was a graceless girl. Sometimes Crystal Brown would make an exception, and Long John Silver’s became that exception, because sometimes they’d be driving in that part of town and Steph’s mother would give her that look that meant something secret and exciting between the two of them, and they’d come home with greasy bags and lay out a blanket. They always laid out the same blanket on their bare wood floor; a scratchy black-and-gray wool number, the one that had been around longer than Steph had.

 

“When I was little, I had a gray German Shepherd, Stephie,” her mother said. Steph was in the front seat next to her, slumped down, taking a hairbow and turning it into an evil finger-munching monster in her head. “I loved that dog. He saved my life, you know, I fell once out back and broke my leg and was stuck, and Risky went and howled until someone came.”

 

Stephie nodded. The finger-munching monster had munched four of her fingers, and things were serious. She hadn’t been paying a lot of attention, then, and she wondered if things might have been different if she had, if there had been one person in the world hanging on to Crystal Brown’s every word.

 

But sometimes they would settle on the floor and eat Long John Silver’s, and they always called it a picnic. It wasn’t a picnic—it was the opposite of a picnic, but the word made Steph feel like it was special, and in a life that was one gray classroom to another and one empty spot to another just about anything could’ve made her feel special. 

 

Her dad came to a family picnic exactly once, when he crawled home from after being gone for three days. For Stephie, it was about the longest she’d ever gone without the angry presence of her dad huffing and puffing from one room to the next, because age six was more than a milestone of grace; it was a milestone of independence, if you asked Steph’s dad. 

 

He came home and the door slammed against the wall, and Mom’s face went white as chalk, and she said, “Stephie, give your father and I a minute.” She sat up and walked in her soft shoes to the kitchen, light, airy. She leaned against the doorframe, face cast in yellow light, and hissed, “Arthur, where have you  _ been?” _   
  
“Making money,” he hissed. Steph heard the soft thump of his jacket as it hit the table. “What does it look like I’ve been doing, Crystal? Someone’s got to pay  _ your _ debt, someone’s got to feed  _ your _ leech—”

 

And then her mom made a shocked noise, like she’d been hit, and that’s when the noise began—the screaming, the howling. All words that Stephie couldn’t understand, that flew through one ear and out the other; later, later, she’d look back and each sentence would reveal its meaning to her. In third grade she’d watch a documentary in science class about leeches and she’d sit upright in her chair because the pieces had clicked, and in fourth grade she’d learn  _ damn you  _ and in fifth she’d sit in a class and they’d talk about puberty, and that’s when Steph would figure it out, the great cosmic secret that had made her life a living hell, the one called  _ pregnancy— _

 

But when she was little, she and her mother used to have picnics with Long John Silver’s on the floor. 

 

“Hey, Steph?”

 

Steph flinched at the sound, and to hide the fact that she did, she hauled herself forward and sat up. She was in a house of eagle-eyed freaks, now. She had to be careful. 

 

Dick poked his head into the room, giving her an awkward little wave. His eyes twinkled, and Steph privately thought it was an asshole thing to do, to have your eyes twinkle when someone’s dad just died. But then again she didn’t think Dick could really do anything about it, because those were just his eyes, because there was something in Dick that was always twinkling, and maybe that was why Bruce loved him so damn much.

 

“Can I come in?”

 

“Uh, sure,” she said, pulling her hair over her shoulder, fingers separating it and lacing it up almost on instinct. Dick had that look on his face that looked a bit like what a labrador would if labs had silky, curly hair and dark eyebrows. It was the face he used on victims at crime scenes, the one that said,  _ I don’t know you, and I don’t know what you’re going through, but I see you.  _ And that look was real scary because being seen was a hard thing to be. People either started crying because finally someone had seen what was happening behind their chests, or they started crying because oh,  _ God, _ someone had seen what was happening behind their chests. 

 

Dick settled on the edge of the bed, shoulders straight and stiff in a way that meant he was trying too hard, and said, “How’re you holding up, tiger?”

 

“Um, fine, really,” she said. 

 

“Oh. That’s, that’s good,” Dick said. “Not that it—if you’re not actually fine, you know, that’s fine too. Losing a parent is, uh, hard. There’s no shortage of people in this house who get that. If you want to talk about it, we’re all here for you.”

 

“Okay,” she said. 

 

He made a move to pat her knee, and then doubted it halfway through, and his hand came down clumsily on the bedspread beside it. “Good,” he said. “This is good. This is progress. So I’ll just. Leave you to it, okay? And, uh, later, I have a proposition—I’d like to train you with—I’ll just… head on out.”

 

Dick slid off the bed, and backed through the door, leaving with another little wave. She counted down from sixty in her head, flipped around, and screamed into her pillow. 

 

Steph never went to her father’s funeral, and she never gave a eulogy, but if she had she imagined it would have gone something like this:

 

She’d get up from her chair, smooth down the front of a simple black dress. She’d stand at one of those wood podiums and behind her there’d be a wooden casket, and church windows, and flowers, she figured, because that was what they had at funerals. 

 

“My father was an asshole,” she’d say, and everyone would gasp. Not that there’d be anyone there, even. “He was an asshole to me, he was an asshole to my mom, and I don’t fucking miss him.”

 

And she’d be Schrodinger’s girl, the one who was lying and telling the truth all at the same time. 

 

-

 

The train that ran through Gotham chugged along a steel track a hundred years old, designed with all the flair Pinkney had painted Gotham’s buildings with, that the Gates had reproduced on Gotham’s famous bridges—arches of blackened metal spun like spiderwebs, spiraling towards Main Street Station closer to Gotham’s heart. It cut straight through the city on a slight curve, and then, in one of Gotham’s desolate suburbs, the tracks finally sank into solid ground and it’d roar just a mile past Wayne Manor before it was gone from beneath Gotham’s dark skies entirely. Under the train tracks, pressed between the metal webbing to the cold column, hooked in only because she was pressing her back into the bars girding the column and had her hands hooked through the wooden slats above, was maybe Steph’s favorite place in the entire city, and she was sure it was no one else’s. Probably. 

 

She knew Batman and Nightwing liked it up high, but she didn’t know where exactly, and she knew Tim liked the great steeple of the church on Englehart and Cass liked the alleyway on Breyfogle that was so tight she had to slip in sideways—but she didn’t know about Hood, because the guy was a total enigma who just got more confusing the more Steph talked to him, and she didn’t know about Robin, because she wasn’t sure Robin liked anything, and she didn’t know about Babs, because Babs was fucking terrifying. Trying to work up the nerve to ask Barbara Gordon a straight question was like trying to raise a rabbit that didn’t hop—and though she’d never tell anyone, because she’d (rightfully) get punched in the gut if she did, but she thought it was the most ironic thing this side of the planet that a paralyzed woman made her feel absolutely spineless. So she wasn’t quite certain that no one else would find her here, but she had a feeling that—

 

Oh shit. That feeling? Wrong. 

 

Above her the tracks rattled as someone landed on them, heavily. It wouldn’t be Nightwing, because Nightwing was back in Bludhaven, and Tim wasn’t nearly heavy enough, and neither was Robin. It might be Hood, and Steph would maybe be okay with that because she’d recently found out the man had curious and odd opinions about what was considered a taco and that was endearing. Steph kind of hoped it was Batwoman. Steph didn’t talk much to Batwoman but everything she did looked badass, and Steph kind of envied her for it. If it was Batman—

 

“Stephanie,” a voice growled above her. 

 

“Fuck,” Steph hissed. 

 

There was the creak of leather as Batman crouched. She could see the white lenses staring at her through the slats, the grim set to his mouth. He always looked like someone had died. “I take it you’re happy to see me,” he said, dryly. 

 

A joke. Okay, she could probably work with that. “Just ecstatic,” she said, through gritted teeth. “What’d I do wrong?”

 

“You’re out late.”

 

_ “You’re _ out late,” she countered.

 

He huffed. “I usually don’t head back until an hour ‘til dawn.”

 

Steph blinked. “When do you sleep?”

 

He moved so he was sitting with his legs, and part of his cape, hanging over the edge. “My alarm clock is dinner.”

 

Steph laughed. “Holy shit. You serious?”

 

“Hn. Deeply.”

 

“I thought you avoided me because you didn’t like me.”

 

“If I didn’t like you, you wouldn’t be living with me.”

 

Steph swallowed. “Oh,” she said, stupidly. It felt like a revelation, but put like that, in simple, effective logic, it was—it was only that.   


 

Batman patted the length of track next to him. “Come sit.” 

 

In a series of complicated maneuvers, Steph flipped herself around and swung from support beam to support beam before crawling over the lip of the track and sitting down heavily. She tried to hide how much that winded her after balancing beneath the tracks for so long.  


 

“You’ve been working with Dick,” Batman rumbled, and he sounded appreciative. It sounded weird, in his rough voice. 

 

Steph crossed her arms over her stomach. “Yeah,” she said. She had been—Dick had been the soul of courtesy, recently, which stung coming from a guy who hadn’t believed in her. But none of them had. And here was Batman sitting next to her, not being a total asshole and not being kind from a distance, but sitting next to her and talking to her as if she were an actual person. Miracles did happen. 

 

“He’s told me you’re quite good, getting better. In point of fact I think you’ve improved a great deal, over the past few months. Good work,” he said, and for all the inflection his voice had, he could’ve been talking about the newspaper being blown across the street. 

 

Steph felt her face go slack. “What,” she said. It sounded even more stupid than the last time she sounded stupid. 

 

He folded his gauntlet-covered hands. “Tomorrow I have a mission with the Justice League. It is a high probability I don’t return in one piece. And if there is one thing I refuse to die before doing, it is continuing to let you believe that I think you are a subpar operative. You are not. Me leading you to believe otherwise is a failure of you.” 

 

Steph blinked. Her eyes were burning, her throat was tight and hot. “If it took my dad dying for you to say something nice I wish it’d have happened a long time ago,” she snarled. 

 

“Stephanie—”

 

She scrambled backwards, pushing herself upright and jabbing her finger at him. “You know what, fuck you! Just  _ fuck you!  _ Too little, too late! My dad died three whole months ago, and I didn’t even like him anyway, and I don’t want your  _ approval _ anymore!”

 

Batman had stood up, was approaching her cautiously, like she was a wild animal. Fuck him, she could be dangerous, too. So she punched him as hard as she could, and he let her. When he turned back toward her, there was a thin stream of blood snaking down from his nose and over his lip, and she looked at it and thought  _ good.  _

 

Then there were strong arms around her, tight and safe feeling, and she crumpled into them sobbing harder than she ever had in her life. “Why do I _miss_ him,” she choked out. “I hated him, I hated him, why do I still love _him.”_

 

A kiss was dropped into her hair. Bruce said nothing, just held her until she had no more tears to cry. But even then he didn’t stop holding her, not even when the sun began to pull over the horizon. 

 

“Past your bedtime,” she rasped. 

 

A thumb stroked her shoulder. “Indeed it is,” he said.

 

“I’m sorry,” she mumbled, wiping at her face with the rough edge of her cape. Tears had slid beneath her mask, causing the leather to stick to her cheeks uncomfortably. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I don’t know what I’m—”

 

“Grieving,” Bruce interrupted. She leaned away and turned so she could study his face, and truly he looked serious, honestly so. “You’re grieving.” 

 

“My dad’s been dead for three months.”

 

Bruce held her gaze. “Grief has no timeline.” 

 

“I hated my father,” Steph insisted. “Loathed him. You know that, you were there. So why would I…” 

 

She slammed the palm of her hand into her forehead, over and over, until Bruce grabbed her arm and gently dropped her hand back in her lap.

 

He looked at her sternly but spoke softly; “You are a detective. Do your job.”

 

“Are you asking me to psychoanalyze myself?”

 

Bruce shifted slightly—stretched out his leg a bit more. “It is important to know why you react the way that you do. At all times, your reactions must be able to be gauged, anticipated.”

 

Steph elbowed him in the side. “Nerd.” 

 

Bruce made a noise that was most approximately a _whuff._ They fell silent, then, watching as the sun inched higher and higher. 

 

Eventually Steph said, “I don’t know. I don’t… I don’t know.” 

 

“That is your next case. Your personal one,” he said. “Figure it out. You don’t need to tell me, or anyone else. But you need to know.”

 

She bobbed her head up and down. “Okay, uh—okay.” She didn’t think it was going to be nearly as simple as he put it. But she nodded anyway. 

 

He stood, one of his joints popping as he did so, and said, “I’ll take you to eat. Where?”

 

Steph bit her tongue, and said, “Long John Silver’s.”

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you guys liked it!


End file.
